Carl's Doomsday Scenario Author: Matt Dinniman Genre: Fantasy, Sci-fi Released: 2021 Rating: ★★★★★ "The training levels have concluded. Now the games may truly begin."
The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive.
They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriv...
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far.
ChatGPT Work is actually two products
The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed via chatgpt.com or through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let's call it Work Cloud .
If you install the ChatGPT desktop app - the app that used to be cal...
What's up on the small web? August 2026 roundup
2026-08-30 12:15
Summer rolls on, and the small web had a busy month: a major Lagrange release, a new graphical client for Android and desktop, terminal tools crossing v2.0, and some good community debates. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in August 2026.
Geminispace past 5,000 known capsules
On August 24, Lupa (Stéphane Bortzmeyer's Gemini crawler) published a fresh snapshot:...
Cancelation Terminology
Aug 31, 2026
A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation,
asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these
specific three terms , but I want to call your attention to the three
things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other.
synchronous cancelation is an (often implicit) control flow structure.
It unwinds the stack and looks like this:
task. cancel ();
// The task will...
Morning in the Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities New home sales are down 6.3% year over year. [ C...
The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Zurich. The mood was electric: They were this close to a career-defining breakthrough. The group — consisting of then-postdocs Sahar Diskin and Philip Easo, graduate student Ritvik Ramanan Radhakrishnan, Benny Sudakov, and Vincent Tassion — was perfecting a solution to one of the biggest open problems in…
Source The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Z...
fuck your AI slop: 5 rules of writing cold messages that actually get sales
nmn.gl
I’ve been helping SF companies get sales and one of my customers came to me with a cold message that he wasn’t getting any good results with it.
A competitor tool generated it. Can you find out what’s wrong here?
If you said “everything”, you’re right. There’s so much wrong with this message and I feel bad that he’d been using it for months.
as part of the 1:1 onboarding on my GTM product, I’ve been helping my customers fix their sequence and messages so they get the m...
Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline
their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities are
founded on the data that AI accesses, and for many organizations that
foundation is little more than sand. Pramod Sadalage and
Prem Chandrasekaran write about how to build a reliable
foundation of data that can be accurate and trusted.
more…
Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline
...
A gentleman by the name of Gustav emailed to say hello, and to let me know he found my blog via Bubbles . I’d never heard of it before, but I’m partial to the name and colour scheme. They characterise my blog thusly:
Tech 40%
Life 38%
Writing 5%
Music 4%
Politics 4%
Culture 3%
I’m not sure how they derive these, but it sounds about right? What I’m most curious about is how they classify the missing 3%. They probably reserve that for posts like this .
I just realised t...
In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868 , for the 'Daytime' and 'Time' Protocols, respectively.
My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first 'new' computer, a Power Mac G3, in 2000. With the introduction of Mac OS 8.5, Apple added a 'Network Time Server' option in the Date & Time Control Panel. In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest , I came across RFC ...
BILL: Lance, I have a question and a meta question: a) List all the presidents and vice presidents who were colorblind. b) Do you know this sort of thing since you are colorblind, and hence might have looked this up in the past? LANCE: (b) No. And if Marco Rubio runs for president in 2028 he will need to earn my vote. He won't get it just for being colorblind. As for (a) I asked Claude. Only one case is reasonably well documented, and it isn't a vice president. Bill Clinton is red-green colorbli...
The new Go JSON API: twice as fast, or 1.5x slower?
lemire.me
JSON is a standard format for data interchange. It is effectively a tiny subset of JavaScript made of objects and arrays. It looks as follows {"key":1, "text":[1.0,2.0]} .
Many programming languages include a JSON library in their standard libraries: C#, Go, Java (soon), Python, JavaScript, etc. The Go implementation is convenient, but not especially fast.
Go 1.27 makes a new JSON package ( encoding/json/v2 ) available by default in its standard library. The two APIs look almost the same:
...
In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement” : not how much money they made for their company, but how much they would have made compared to the average engineer in their position. I’ve always found it vaguely silly when engineers put “built a product that made $X” on their resumes, when they just did the JIRA tickets that came across their desk.
Today, value over replacement is even more important. A replacement-level engineer in the 2...
This post continues to elaborate on Virtual Consensus and the new Loglet abstractions of the AtomicLog and LogDrive . My last post focused on composability, this post looks at log sealing. A common aspect of segmented logs is that when extending the log with a new segment, the current active segment needs to be sealed to prevent further appends. This post discusses segment sealing in the AtomicLog and LogDrive abstractions. I’m going to treat Virtual Consensus here less as a fixed API and m...
0.0 Context setting
Thursday, 27 August 2026 in Portland, Oregon. I started this on Tuesday and then now suddenly it’s Thursday? That’s no fun.
Separately, I’ve also started noticing a bit of burnout or a bit of pressure? I enjoy writing, but I also don’t want this to become some sort of horrific pressure. Which is why I’m trying very hard for it to not be a big deal that I had a gap of a couple days.
Also! This is episode 26 of season 21 , which is a lot of episodes. The prev...
The other day, I found myself wondering how big 52! (52 factorial) is,
and that led me to ponder how these could be estimated without a
calculator or a computer.
It turns out there’s some fairly interesting math behind being able to
estimate the size (number of digits) of a factorial reasonably
accurately. This post will start by stating how to do the estimate, and
if you’re curious you can read on for the math background.
Without further ado, the approximation is:
\[\text{number of di...
About a year ago, I was offered a presentation slot at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin. I rarely take speaking engagements, especially international ones, but this one arrived at just the right time, the right place, and with the right person – I said yes, on the contingency that Ben Dumke-von der Ehe joins me in the presentation. Ben is an early community hire at Stack Overflow who lives in Berlin. We both had something important we wanted to talk about, with slightly diffe...
There’s a widespread belief that artificial superintelligence (ASI) is
inevitable. In this post, I argue that this is false, and believing it is
upstream of a lot of bad discourse.
Why do people believe it?
It’s easy to believe. Samuel Butler , already in 1863,
observed that machines are improving faster than humans are
improving. Today, AI systems are gaining capabilities much faster than humans:
in five years we went from systems that can barely string together a sentence to
auto...
I am sitting with a cup of tea by my side as I have been on many mornings this month. This morning, my tea cup, instead of being precariously balanced on the arm of the chair, rests between the right arm of the chair and my right leg, keeping me warm. I love being cosy. In “ Countryside; Blaugust ”, I noted how much seeing my friends participate in Blaugust encouraged me to participate. This year, the minimum requirement to participate was to write five posts in the month. I didn’t write...
Cores in space: The core memory module from a 1980 Spacelab computer
www.righto.comSpacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts
and experiments. 1
Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS, 2
rather than the Shuttle's main computers, IBM-built AP-101 systems.
For storage, the Spacelab computer contained 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Rather than silicon memory, the computer used magnetic core memory, with each bit stored in a tiny ferrite ring.
In this...
I lost count of how many times I looked—and photographed—Mount Krn over the past decade. It’s impossible to miss, standing right there in the background of almost all my walks around the valleys, with its 2245 meters and its characteristic gently sloping side.
And yet, I never hiked it. The reason why I never hiked it was that it’s a long hike and past me wasn’t a fan of long hikes. But past me is, well, in the past. Current me, on the other hand, loves long hikes. And to be fair, ...
So how did I do ?
Teach Organizational Change in Manchester in July: check.
Teach shutting projects down for the first time: check.
Teach How to Not Be Wrong About AI :
no one was interested enough to host it, which surprised me.
Revise and deliver Managing Research Software Projects :
revised, but haven’t delivered.
Finish writing Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code :
check, for some value of “finished”.
Write Lean for Python Programmer...
By Emma Yanyang Kong , Aditya Deshpande , Asad Abbasi , Bowei Yan , David Fagnan , Ashish Rastogi , Dhaval Patel , Ray Zhang Introduction The Netflix experience is a journey of discovery. Every visual cue, from the artwork on a title to the video previews that autoplay while you browse, is there to connect you with a story you will love. We call these visual cues assets , and choosing the right one for each member is a personalization problem of its own. But which image or video previe...
